Everything I Own I Carry on My Back

Daniel Cano 

                                                                                     

Precious Possessions

     One day, it hit me. Everything I owned I carried on my back, just like in Tim O’Brien classic Vietnam War novel, The Things They Carried.

     In his collection of stories, O’Brien returns to the same theme, the things soldiers carry going into combat, personal choices, like, “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.”

     Next came the objects the army required: 5 lb. steel helmets and helmet liners, camouflage liners, plastic ponchos, fatigue jackets and trousers, extra underwear and socks. Depending on a guy’s size, some guys carried more than others, personal choices like foot powder, comic books, extra C rations, and letters. Lastly, came the weapons, equipment, and ammunition, maybe 60-80 lbs. total, unless you were the unlucky one who had to haul the M-60 machine gun, a mortar, or radio.

     I don’t remember exactly where I was when the idea flashed in my mind, something of an epiphany, maybe during an intense period in the Central Highlands. Most likely, I was talking to a friend, in a moment of clarity, sitting down and leaning back, my rucksack, a backrest, “Man, dig it, everything we own is on our back. Ain’t that some deep shit?”

     The things that come to nineteen-year-old-soldiers, during extraordinary conditions, sometimes childish and naïve ideas, but other times, unexpectedly, profound. Back at my parents’ home, I had little, no car, no house, maybe just out-of-style clothes hanging in the closet.

     The guys in the infantry were choosy about what they carried. They had to lug whatever they carried through thick jungle, up mountains, and across streams. They carried the minimum, less weight, less stress. One time, a friend of mine confessed, “Sometimes we get so tired we started tossing stuff, extra clothes, equipment, even ammunition. You know, always playing the odds. I saw a guy slide part of a mortar into the bushes, and later claimed he lost it.”

     In the artillery, setting up at a firebase, we had the luxury of carrying extra items on our backs, like extra fatigues, socks, and underwear, for the guys who wore underwear. We might carry enough C rations to get us through a day, since choppers flew into our firebase and dropped off cases of the stuff to us.

     One time, I hid a portable record player and a bunch of 45’s between a towel. Noah always carried four 33 LP records, jazz, mainly, the same four albums, Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Smith, Lou Rawls, and Dionne Warwick. Our medic, Doc Conklin, carried a pound of marijuana, knowing he’d have to share with his friends.

     The longest we stayed at a firebase was over a month. The place became something of a home, marked trails leading from one gun section to another, from the Fire Direction Center to the officers’ hooch, and each gun section building a private latrine, a primo spot on the side of the mountain, hidden by brush, and overlooking a wide valley. Sometimes, the things we carried lasted us more than thirty-days.

     I got to thinking about all this as I read Monday’s La Bloga post, where Michael Sedano describes fleeing the Altadena fire and taking what he needed most: “I grabbed my prescriptions, my laptop, wallet, glasses, and shaving kit. My camera and long lens were already in the car. The next morning my entire worldly possession were the clothes on my body and the stuff I’d taken for a night’s stay in a motel.” He photographed all his belongings in the back of his car.

     There was a photo in the newspaper of a man in Altadena standing in front of his burned-out house. The story said he lost everything, even his beloved 1969 Corvette. Ouch! That had to have hurt.

      Unlike most cultures, Americans live in a “throw-away” society. We just toss out what’s old and buy new stuff. Our garages, attics, and basements are filled with stuff, just like our trash dumps. We love stuff. We even have personal relationships to our “things,” not just life’s necessities but objects we consider valuable, grandma’s piano, or her old Singer sewing machine, antique typewriters, family photos, paintings, books, rugs, wardrobe, jewelry, documents, cars, boats, tools, and different types of equipment for every occasion, in some cases, things we’ve collected over a lifetime.

     It reminds me of a scene from Carlos Fuentes’ book, the Old Gringo, when the Mexican peasant army rides through the home of a rich family, destroying everything in its path, not giving a thought about valuable items. To a rebel, it’s all junk the rich, or the want-to-be-rich acquire, to give them status.

     As a nineteen-year-old soldiers in Vietnam, what I couldn’t carry on my back, I left in my duffle bag back at our base camp, a place we rarely visited. I had my civilian clothes, my summer khakis, and shoes. I had no need for my winter dress uniform. I left that in my closet, at home, my old room taken over by my younger siblings. That was it, the extent of my worldly possessions.

     It wasn’t complicated. Life was simple. It didn’t take much to make it through each day. In the jungle, or on a mountaintop, we wore the same fatigues and boots for days. When they got too rank, we’d take them down to the creek, or fill a helmet with water from a tank, and wash them. For meals, we’d open C rations, two cans, a main meal and desert. I liked the pound cake. On lucky days, a chopper would fly out and deliver a hot meal in metal canisters, usually spaghetti and vegetables.

     Today, all these years later, when I look into my closet, I see pants and shirts galore, some I haven’t worn in ten years, some holdovers from before I retired, when I had to dress nicely, a short period of shirts and ties. Necessities? I guess I tell myself they are, but, probably, I’m down to wearing the same two pairs of pants and a handful of shirts, and my favorite two jackets in winter, and, really don’t need the rest of it, which takes up most of the closet.

     What of my laptop, thumb drives, library, photos, souvenirs from my travels, guitars, and amplifiers, files of papers, journals, drafts of stories, manuscripts, even an original script to the movie Apocalypse Now, my treasured possessions? The real question is how much do I need them, or how much would I miss them if they were lost? To lose it all, suddenly, like in an earthquake or fire, might be devastating, for a while. Of course, it’s one thing to imagine it, and quite another to experience it.

     I have lost prized possessions, twice my favorite bass guitars and amplifiers, one time stolen out of my car and another time out of my buddy’s house. I’ve lost special rings and religious medallions, just up and misplaced them. I once had a car I loved, but I cracked the block and ruined it when I didn’t notice how bad the radiator was leaking. I sold what was left of it for a pittance and didn’t think twice about it. Truthfully, I’m not an acquisitive person. I don’t need much to be happy, just enough to survive.

     Take a car, for instance, even if I could afford a Mercedes, a BMW, or some high-end car, I would never buy one, mainly because it ain’t me. I’ll take a mini-van, a Corolla or a Camry. I wanted to buy a cool classic car, maybe a ’55 Chevy, but then, I thought, knowing me, I wouldn’t take care of it and just end up worrying about it, like David Thoreau, in his book Walden, where he lived, alone, in a one-room cabin to get away from the rat race.  A neighbor offered him a rug, but Thoreau turned it down, thinking it would be more a nuisance than a help.

     I find comfort in a 1950, 1200 square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath house in a part of town where the weather rarely rises above 80-degrees in the summer and no lower than 40 in the winter. I could have bought a four-bedroom, three-bath home, with a swimming pool, in a part of L.A. where it cooks in summer and is frigid in winter, but I don’t want to keep-up a house that size, nor do I want to deal with bad weather?

     Sometimes, I think it was my time in the army that made me feel this way about possessions. Yet, I have friends who were also in the army but aren’t happy unless they own the best of everything, cars, home, clothes, etc. etc. Maybe, my lack of respect for possessions goes back further, to my parents, who were both frugal, working-class Mexicans, who watched their immigrant parents struggle to make it in the U.S.

     My dad didn’t give a hoot about acquiring possessions. He was practical and comfortable in sneakers, jeans, a UCLA sweatshirt, and a baseball cap. He drove a battered 1949 Chevy truck into the 1970s, not because it was a classic but because he needed it on the job. My mother liked nice things, nice home, nice car, nice clothes, but nothing extravagant. It’s like both my parents knew and were comfortable with their stations in life, especially living within their means. My mother hated debt. She saw debt as a form of slavery. If she couldn’t buy it, she’d do without. Credit cards? Forget about it. She put it on the lay-away plan for a lot of years. When she did get a credit card, she paid it off each month.

     Maybe it was in Catholic school, where I spent ten years, taught by Irish nuns and brothers, most who grew up in poverty. They wore the same uniform every day. We wore the same uniform every day. They taught us about poverty around the world. We learned about sacrifice, and all the other Catholic things most of you out there, probably, know about. We heard Bible stories each day. My guess is they wanted to make all of us priests and nuns. Not much chance in that, but their stories took hold, the parables of Jesus tossing the moneychangers out of the temple, how everyone looked down on the tax collectors, how Jesus turned down all the world’s riches, if he bowed down to Satan.

     We read the stories of the saints, Francis, Teresa, John of the Cross, Jude, the Apostles, laborers, like our parents, to seek answers in the spiritual and not the material world. Was that the basis for my lack of interest in possessions? Oh, I know the other argument. The rich pound that nonsense into the poor to keep them poor. Maybe so.

     I always had a soft spot for John Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat. Though it was heavily critiqued in the 1970s by Chicano literary critics for its portrayal of Mexicans as drunk, lazy, and subservient, I saw it differently. Though, I don’t deny the portrayal, as a child of the laboring class, I also found something romantically refreshing about a non-conformist, anti-establishment Chicano community who rebelled against the powerful and their material possessions, a very 1960s youth philosophy. Something rich in the lyrics, “When you ain’t got nothing/ You got nothing to lose.”

     Our artists sang about this land being our land/from California to the New York Island. Like Kerouac, we hit the road, dropping out, and seeking new ways of reflection, mind expansion, and understanding. Alan Watts taught us to look to the East, and to other worlds, even if the East was communist, and we were in a cold war, all people had something of value to share with one another.

      Many of us lived the lyrics, “You, you who are on the road/ Must have a code/ That you can live by,” or “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” For us, my generation, the "words of the prophets are written on the subway walls," except here in L.A. maybe written on the freeway overpass. I started college, dropped out, worked, explored, and confused my parents by not buying a house and settling down. My Mexican relatives didn’t get it. An older aunt asked, “You think you are a gypsy?”

      How could I explain the times were changing? Though, I think my dad, who fought his own demons, understood, if not intellectually then psychically. When life wrapped him up too tightly, he sought freedom in his own way.

     I, like many at the time, hit the road. For those of us who experienced war, maybe it was our way of forgetting, or reliving the adrenalin rush. We felt betrayed by our elders who governed us. We needed something different, so we cashed in our chips and started, “Truckin’, like the doo-dah man.” We itched to find out, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

     With a college fellowship, I took my young family, sold everything, all our possessions, and, on a budget as fragile as a butterfly’s wings, headed out for Spain, on the heels of Don Quijote, looking for answers, the whimsical dreamer. Later, I travelled up the California coast, into Oregon, and across Mexico, in a van, wanting to live like a turtle, carrying whatever I owned on my back.

     Even when I settled down, my mind wouldn’t rest. I wanted an answer and realized, that yes, just like the troubadour sang, the answer is still, “blowing in the wind.” Maybe Tolstoy got it right in his short story, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" At the end, his main character, who gets a bit greedy, dies, and ends up needing just six feet of land, enough to bury him.

      It’s really no use for someone like me, or maybe you, too, to ever find the philosopher’s stone. I’d probably just end up losing it anyway – and move on down the road.